Wi-fi And The Law

[JeanneP]

I once chastised a cruiser who was gleefully setting up his boat to be able to access anybody's unsecured wireless connection. He crowed about this free Wi-Fi to make overseas telephone calls from his boat for free. Though connecting to the internet via somebody else's wireless connection in order to get your emails and browe the Net might not slow down the legitimate user's own use of the connection, somebody making telephone calls off it will gobble plenty of bandwidth. My comment to this fellow was that technically he was stealing. His reply was "there's no law against it."

Well, I think that the time is coming when that kind of blatant overuse of another's wifi connection will be prosecuted. Here's an article from the November 6, 2007 issue of PC Magazine.

"Police are arresting those who connect to unsecured wireless networks. But is it really a crime to surf for free?

by Erik Rhey

Piggybacking on your neighbors Wi-Fi connection may seem like a victimless crime unworthy of punishment, but some officials beg to differ. In late August, the BBC reported that London police arrested a 39-year-old man for connecting to an unsecured Wi-Fi network while standing outside the network owner's home. In the U.K., clear provisions such as the Communications Act 2003 and the Computer Misuse Act ban this practice. But here in the States, the laws are vaguer.

The closest the U.S. comes to outlawing Wi-Fi mooching is Title 18, Section 1030 of the U.S. Code, which prohibits "unauthorized access." According to Tracy Mitrano, director of information technology policy at Cornell University, there are three types of laws that courts use to try to prosecute Wi-Fi filchers: those dealing with trespassing, hacking, and creating counterfeit cable boxes.

"It's not a perfect fit," Mitrano says. "Trespass law was based on physical space. I don't think any of them successfully address the issue."

Often, state and local regulations are prosecuted in vastly different ways. In 2005, a Florida man was charged with a third-class felony for lurking outside a Tampa house with his laptop. And two men, one in Alaska and one in Michigan, were handed down fines for accessing free Wi-Fi hot spots from the street, instead of inside the walls of the business.

In 2006, the legislature of Westchester County, on the outskirts of New York City, became the first in the country to pass a law requiring businesses to secure their internal wireless networks. County Board Chair Bill Ryan says that the measure was put into place to protect both the data of local businesses and the personal information of employees.

Mitrano, like many others, feels the responsibility lies with users to secure their home or business networks. She warns against hindering wireless technology's progress through overlegislation.

"Thank goodness we don't live in a country where we are required to process all of our technology through federal and state governments—where it is not released until lawmakers are shown every intended and unintended use to establish a legal framework," she says. "We would throw ourselves back into the Stone Age if we did that.""

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